The Sphinx by the Pool

Margaret sat on her back porch, watching her granddaughter Sophie splash in the pool above ground that Arthur had installed forty years ago. The girl's laughter rippled across the afternoon air like the water itself, pure and uncomplicated joy that made Margaret's heart ache with remembering.

Barnaby, their aging orange tabby, sprawled across Margaret's feet, his purr a steady, ancient engine of contentment. He'd been a wedding gift from their daughter, now grown and gone to California.

"Grandma!" Sophie called, dripping wet. "Your iPhone is ringing!"

Margaret fumbled with the device that still felt foreign in her arthritic hands. Her great-grandson Lucas, six years old and full of questions, appeared on screen.

"Great-Grandma," he said seriously, "what's a sphinx?"

Margaret smiled. In the corner of her garden stood the small stone sphinx she'd brought back from Egypt in 1972, when she and Arthur were young and brave enough to travel the world alone.

"A sphinx," she told him, "is a creature who knows that the best questions don't have simple answers. Like why we love who we love, or where the years go."

That evening, as the summer cooled and Sophie finally tired herself out, Margaret cut into a ripe papaya. The scent flooded her with sudden, sharp memory—Arthur, standing in their first apartment kitchen, teaching her how to choose the perfect one, his hands sure and warm against hers. He'd told her then that life was like this fruit: sweetest when you had the patience to let it ripen.

The cat appeared, pawing at her leg for a taste. Margaret laughed and shared the sweetness with him.

Some riddles, she thought, watching the fireflies dance above the pool, do have answers after all. They just take a lifetime to understand.